Archive for December, 2006
Darfur Diaries Interview with Gayle Smith
As a follow up to the Center for American Progress’ screening of Darfur Diaries, Anne Shoup and Paige Fitzgerald interviewed Gayle Smith, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, who had introduced the Center’s screening of the film. Full audio is available here. Gayle Smith served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs at the National Security Council from 1998-2001. She has spent much of her career in international affairs in the field and in 1999 won the National Security Council’s Samuel Nelson Drew Award for Distinguished Contribution in Pursuit of Global Peace for her role in the successful negotiation of a peace agreement between Eritrea and Ethiopia.
Reel Progress: Please describe the situation in Darfur and whether you think it deserves to be called a “genocide.”
‘Darfur Diaries’ Shows Plight of Sudanese Victims of Government-Backed Violence
By Carolyn Weaver
Voice of America News
New York City
Activists Aisha Bain, Adam Shapiro,
and Jen Marlowe documented the
crisis in Sudan.
In the spring of 2004, three young activists embarked on a mission to a part of the world they’d scarcely heard of before: Darfur, a region in western Sudan. They wanted to make a film from the perspective of Darfurians who’d fled attacks by Sudanese government- supported militias. The resulting film, Darfur Diaries, and a book of the same title, are meant to draw more international attention to the crisis in Sudan, which the United Nations says has displaced nearly two million people, and left 200,000 dead.
“Those who died, died over there,” an old woman matter-of-factly tells the camera in Darfur Diaries. “Some of our people were killed there. Some ran away. We took our kids by the hand to come here. We ran away. We carried nothing with us. We left everything there,” she says, “our cows, our animals. We ran by ourselves.”
